So, I finally popped my Beatles cherry this morning, and bought their Love album. Call it an impulse purchase, call it a desire to hear outside my head some of the songs that play within it, call it about time too. Whatever: I wanted to listen to something old, and new, at the same time. And it’s brilliant: fresh and fabulous all over again, which is kind of what I’m looking to do when I approach the low-budget thriller I’ll be writing soon. Only, how do you reinvent the wheel when that circular one works so well already?

Genre-splicing is where it’s at in the world of low and micro budget film making. It makes sense: you want to capture an audience’s attention, and one very good way to do that in the absence of high-paid stars is by presenting them with something they haven’t seen before. Or, more accurately, something that has elements of the familiar, with a twist of originality. And one way to do that is to fuse genres.

Before looking at how genres can be fused, let’s look at genres in their base form however. In essence, a genre is a species of story recognised by distinguishing characteristics. These are so particular that they’re easily spotted in a 90 second trailer. A romantic comedy will feature two people who for some reason can’t act on their initial attraction, and may even deny it, before circumstances lead to the fruition of their relationship. A thriller will feature pursuit in some form, and something bigger than an individual’s life is quite possibly at stake when the chase is on.

Somewhere inside, we know the rules of a whole bunch of genres. And filmmakers are increasingly scrambling them in the pursuit for some small degree of novelty to attract audiences who are more than au fait with how things go. Hence the rise of Charlie Kaufman, writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hence a film like The Cooler, which to follow the logic of both its genre parents – thriller and romance – goes through all manner of twists and turns to create an ending that’s dark and happy at the same time. Hence the approach of low budget studio Slingshot, whose Arvind David has explicitly said he’s interested in films that combine genres in new ways.

All very well, but how to go about this essentially Frankensteinian business? I know someone who swears by the taste sensation that is a peanut butter, fried egg, and brown sauce sandwich, but I’d fear for his chances if he invested his life savings in a café that has only those on the menu. And bear in mind I’m not looking for art-house obscurity with my script: I would absolutely love a sizeable audience to come and see the film if and when it transpires, and for people to hire me to write more scripts in the future.

At the moment, the solution seems to be in the realm of bringing elements of the family drama to the story, and infuse it with the kind of messy relationships that I seem to be drawn to in a lot of my writing. OK, not a startlingly original tack there, and the role model in this respect is The Grifters, and I’m hoping I can bring something original to the table.

And if the thriller-with-a-twist doesn’t work, I’ll head in another direction: I’ve been thinking for a while that there hasn’t been a romcom addressing modern relationships, and specifically the world of polyamory. And it’s got a built-in appeal after all: why settle for one partner over another when you can have both? Hey, I’m not necessarily an advocate for it as a lifestyle, but there’s got to be an audience for a film that at least explores the subject outside the realms of pornography. Besides, the poly people I’ve met include some fascinating and funny characters, and have a vocabulary about their way of doing things I’ve yet to see on screen.

Hmm, somehow we’ve got to a consideration of the joys of three-way loving having started out with The Beatles. I really am a child of the sixties I guess, though I was only a toddler when it happened.

Actor and director Ken Campbell tells a story in one of his one-man shows about a German artist he knew. The artist moved from the city he’d been living in to a small town. And in getting to know the place, he found himself going on walks in the small hours. He’d collect things of interest along the way: leaves, stones, bottle tops and whatever, instinctively knowing that they’d provide some kind of inspiration for him, maybe even become part of his new art.

In the small hours on one occasion, around 3 am, the artist’s pockets were half filled with items he’d collected on that night’s walk. He spotted an intriguingly shaped branch in someone’s garden, stepped towards it, and then stopped when car headlights played around him. In the car were two police officers.

The police asked the artist what he was doing out so late, and the artist realised how what he was doing must have looked to them. He explained that he was collecting items to inspire new art, showed them the oddments in his pockets, and the two police offices looked at one another back and forth. They radioed the police station to see what to do next, and were told to bring the artist in. He was feeling pretty nervy by now.

In the police station, the artist was interviewed by the sergeant there, who ummed and aahed for a while before deciding that expert opinion was needed. She called a psychiatrist the police often dealt with, and asked him to decide what to do with the artist.

The psychiatrist wore pebble glasses and had a salt and pepper beard, and was clearly a very bright man. He spoke to the artist for a while, asking about the things in his pockets and the exhibitions his work had been shown at. Then he paused before asking what the artist realised was a Very Significant Question: ‘You say you’re an artist; but do you have a commission to be doing this?’

The artist looked from the psychiatrist to the sergeant and back, realising that the answer to this question was going to be important. He thought for a minute before replying ‘Yes, I do have a commission’. The psychiatrist shook the artist’s hand, apologised for having him brought to the station, and told the sergeant to release the artist.

When I heard Ken Campbell relate the artist’s story in his show, I decided there and then that I would commission myself to interview Ken. And I did so, spending a fascinating afternoon in Walthamstow Marshes with Ken at his picnic bench office with one of his dogs, learning about a man who claimed to teach people the art of invisibility (the key is knowing how to hide in front of things).

And when I conduct trainings on screenwriting, or creativity in general, I tell that story to the people there, and how it influenced me. When the story comes to its conclusion, I ask them what they’re going to commission themselves to do, since it’s such a powerful way of making something new happen for yourself. And I wonder, having read this story about Ken Campbell and how I came to interview him, and how I use that story in a training context, what you might commission yourself to do?

So, in about three weeks I get to pitch a feature or tv project to an audience of real live people.  It’s a fun opportunity, and one I intend to make the most of.  And that alone gives me an edge over people who find pitching a sordid and unseemly affair, or don’t believe it’s something writers should be doing.  More fool them.  I figure, if I’ve put passion and commitment into getting a script or treatment just right, who better to persuade people that it’s worth finding more about?

Fortunately, I’m pretty resourceful when it comes to making the most of live situations.  For one thing, it’s a chance to get away from the kind of cabin fever that can result from too many days spent at the keyboard away from human company.  For another, I work in plenty of contexts where I’m used to selling myself to get work in copywriting, marketing, training or whatever.  And as far as I can work out, the key isn’t to do with relentlessly plugging whatever your thing is, but building a relationship with the person you’re meeting in which you demonstrate by your behaviour that you will make their life better, simpler, more fun, or whatever.  In other words, be yourself, having made sure you’ve got out of the right side of bed that morning.

The pitching process can be summarised as follows: generate good feelings in your audience, and attach your product or services to those good feelings.  Simple, huh?  And it’s made easier when you clarify your thinking about this whole networking thing.  Like many people, I was sceptical about networking at one point, seeing it as a means of getting people to give you work regardless of whether you like them.  And viewed that way, no wonder I didn’t want anything to do with it.  So it’s a good thing I got my head straight, and started to approach it in a different way: start by filtering for people you like, and work from there to how you can help each other.  No fixed ideas of what you’re going to be doing, more an intent to spend time with people whose company you enjoy doing stuff you like. 

Hmm.  Sounds better that way, doesn’t it?  And since I’ve approached it that way, I’ve become a dab hand at successful networking.  Before Christmas I went to an event intended for producers (another tip: go where your intended audience are, even if you’re not the target audience of the event).  There were a whole bunch of producers there, and most of them were a very sad lot, bemoaning their inability to get projects off the ground, predicting the impossibility of benefiting from the organisation hosting the session, and so on.  And then there were some fresh faced and smiling people who I gravitated to because they seemed like they actually wanted to be there, so we talked.  We discovered, among other things, a mutual love of comics and games.  The latter was no great surprise, since they worked for a computer games company.  But their enthusiasm was palpable, and my response to them was equally keen. 

Business cards were exchanged, leading to a meeting, the result of which is I’ll find out in the next week if I’ve got a significant contract to do a whole bunch of background writing for one of their forthcoming launches.  And all because we got on, and didn’t share the negative outlook of so many of the people at the same event, most of whom went home secure in the knowledge that things were as bad as they suspected.  Their problem.

So, where the pitching event is concerned, bring it on.  I’ve already sent the script in question out to some trusted and cool friends and colleagues in the business for quotes that can be used as part of the presentation or package. And I’ve got the bones of a strapline that gets to the heart of what my show is about, and why it’s different from anything else on television.  After that, it’s just a question of standing up and doing what comes naturally.

‘Write what you know’ has to be the most ball-achingly banal suggestion that anyone ever made to a writer. And it explains so much. The abundance of books and films commencing with the hero getting out of bed. Stories in which it’s painfully clear that someone is using writing as a substitute for therapy they can’t afford about a relationship break-up. An entire genre in the form of soap opera.

If ‘write what you know’ means turning the content of your own life into fiction, then whole swathes of my book and DVD collections would be invalid. No science fiction. No fantasy. Not much to talk of in the thriller section. Instead, reams of worthy biopics and movies of the week ripped from the previous week’s headlines.

But there is a place for ‘write what you know’ if it’s taken to mean emotional experiences rather than mere facts. I don’t know what it’s like to swing a sword in battle, but I remember the chaos and mud and brutality of rugby from school days. I’ve never been to another planet, but I have vivid memories of touching down at JFK airport. And though I’ve never taken on a corrupt establishment single-handed, I’ve seen what corruption can do and acted in my own small ways against it.

Every moment of your life is a resource for a story. And not just your life. Think of the stories you’ve heard from people over the years. The things people will do that seem natural to them, and leave me gaping in admiration, perplexity, or awe. S, raising funds for a hospice in South Africa having been there herself to see an entire generation devastated by AIDS. R, giving a handjob to an overfriendly Belgian to raise funds to get back to Britain after his friends were too stoned to meet up with him in Amsterdam. C, seeing his mother for the first time in five years after being excluded from the family circle for an offence with consequences that will possibly ripple through the remainder of his young life.

Show me somewhere there isn’t a story; someone whose life isn’t rich in incident, character, conflict. Writing is largely a question of choosing which stories you want to focus on, and shaping them in such a way that their particular details become vessels for universally recognised qualities. Story: the means by which we measure and share our experiences.

The question then, is how to keep things fresh. Which means continuing to mix familiar patterns with unexpected detail, or vice versa. That, or face the judgement of the woman who did my hair two cuts back, and commented of Casualty as she tidied my fringe, ‘It’s always the same: someone gets married, someone dies, and someone has a baby’. She had a point. Now, if it was the SAME someone, maybe there’s still a story to be told with those familiar ingredients…

I’ve had a lucky relationship with some of my writing mentors. At the age of 8 or so, I saw a play that captivated me, if only because one of the characters had a swordstick. I remembered it as being a version of Ice Station Zebra, but it wasn’t: it merely shared a genre (thriller) and location (one of the poles) with that film. How did I find this out? Through attending scriptwriting workshops with Jon Wood some twenty years later, who turned out to be the man who’d written that play. I learned a lot from Jon, and he recognised that I was both serious about writing and had potential to succeed if I kept at it.

Another big early influence was Steve Gerber. It was his comics that made me realise comics could be used to tell all kinds of stories. While remaining captivated by the adventures of The Avengers, or Captain America and Falcon, I found in Steve Gerber’s comics an altogether different world, one that both more closely resembled the one I lived in, and had differences more intriguing than the presence of alien warriors and supervillains.

Nowhere was this more true than in the pages of Howard the Duck, which Gerber created for Marvel in the seventies and was beautifully illustrated by Gene Colan, with other strong artists on the series including Frank Brunner. ‘Trapped in a world he never made’ was the comic’s strapline, and I feel it served equally well as a summation of Gerber’s stance: here was a writer who was fascinated, bewildered, perplexed and angry about the world he lived in, and whose work captured those and other feelings convincingly.

I think of Steve Gerber as being Marvel’s own Woody Allen: a neurotic satirist with ideas too big for the medium he was working in. And like Allen, many people will tell you his best work was his early funny stuff. Howard the Duck is as much a commentary on the seventies as the songs of Steely Dan, with stories poking fun at kung fu, Moonies, election campaigns, and changing gender dynamics. All this through the ongoing adventures of a duck wearing trousers – apparently Disney threatened legal action if Marvel stepped onto their territory by having a bare-assed mallard – and his companion Beverley.

Gerber wrote plenty of other comics, and injected even mainstream superhero titles with a touch of the bizarre, but his heart was clearly there for all to see in Howard the Duck. Some of his other work carried on in the same vein, notably Nevada, the story of a showgirl and her ostrich. And more recently he did a great job on Hard Time, about a teenager imprisoned for his participation in a school shooting.

I interviewed Steve Gerber a few years back – anyone wanting a copy of the piece please email me and I’ll be happy to send it to you. His maverick intelligence was apparent, and he was sharp as he described his feelings about the moribund state of the contemporary comics scene, his experience working in television, and more.

More than anything, Gerber blazed a trail for the wave of writers who read him when they were younger and were influenced by his experimentation, his social conscience, his emotional honesty. Without Steve Gerber, would there have been an Alan Moore, a Neil Gaiman, a Grant Morrison? They’re just three of the writers who’ve admitted their debt to Gerber’s work – and pioneering stance on creators’ rights. And somewhere inside me, too, there’s a teenager who still relishes the all-text issue of Howard the Duck, when Gerber was late with the script and instead wrote a series of essays and short fictions addressed directly to the reader, and which captures a lot of what it’s like to be a writer.

If there’s anything good to come out of this – Steve died yesterday after succumbing to pneumonia while awaiting a lung transplant – it’s that at last he’ll now know the answer to a question that runs through his work. Seemingly agnostic in outlook, Gerber was still fascinated by the idea of the soul, and in his stories people lost track of theirs quite easily, as their heads are transplanted onto other bodies, or they experience cosmic revelations. The satirist in him couldn’t resist digging at New Age beliefs, but there was too a genuine curiosity about matters of the spirit in his work, and I hope he’s found peace, wherever whatever remains of him is now.

I totally know who Diablo Cody is.  Yes, I know you’ve all heard she’s the stripper-turned screenwriter who wrote Juno.  And I heart her for that, I really do: Juno is fresh and funny and has dialogue that sizzles and under all that wit it aches and sighs like people ache and sigh, which is much more than most American comedies do, intent as they are on extracting the chuckles without reference to actual human emotion as experienced by actual humans.

Diablo Cody wrote Juno, it is true.  But more importantly, she wrote herself.  I’m doubting very much that Mr and Mrs Cody christened her Diablo, you know?  And there is nothing wrong with that.  Ms Cody has very smartly made the career move of becoming a brand, and it’s paid off for her. 

Commentators are already speaking of Diablo as one of Hollywood’s Top Ten screenwriters after one film, and while her peers are still on strike.  It’s like me proclaiming myself to be the leading cathedral ceiling painter of the 21^st century, knowing it’s unlikely I’m going to get the chance to put that claim to the test.  Diablo will: signs are that the writers’ strike will end soon, and then she’ll have to make her mark with other scripts.  Or become famous for being a screenwriter who doesn’t actually get round to writing, which seems to be the gambit that keeps Harlan Ellison at the forefront of so many sf fans’ minds, when the contentious coot barely publishes and is famous more for his spats (arguments, not gangster-themed footwear accessories).

Diablo will, I’m sure, continue to write incisive scripts, and become a micro-celebrity in her own right.  It’s what she seems to want, and she’s got the talent to do so with legitimacy.  Whether that will make her happy, or whether she’ll become another sex-industry relic with daddy issues and a yen for substances, who knows? 

Hopefully not: if the script for Juno is anything to go by, she’s got a Mac G5 of a mind and a heart in the right place, so let’s hope she doesn’t go the Courtney Love route.  In fact, I can imagine her making a film with a part for Courtney as the raddled old stripper being a mother hen to the younger girls.  It pretty much writes itself, or at any rate the synopsis does, and Diablo’s got the life experience to bring to it that I, dedicated as I am to cathedral ceilings, just don’t have.

Anyway, inspired by Diablo’s success, I’m having a close look at my own brand.  It’s clear that a makeover is needed.  Youdothatvoodoo is a snappy name, and the site is generating work for me directly and indirectly, but as youdothatvoodoo’s ambassador in the real world I need more definition.  I’m thinking a zoot suit, available custom made in San Francisco and well worth the investment for the splash I’ll make at pitch days and the Cheltenham Writers’ Festival.  A haircut to go with it, easily researched.  And a name.  Diablo Cody has got a real snap to it: she could be an undercover agent in a Marvel comic with a name like that.  And I think I’ve got one that’ll work for me, and go with the zoot suit too.  See what you think.

Mephisto Villalobos

I’m looking forward to the rehearsal period for a film I haven’t written yet.  This is technically known as ‘getting ahead of yourself’, but I never saw the harm in anticipation.  And it’s reassuring that the director in question is keen on the rehearsal process too.  Some filmed projects don’t allow time for it, but I believe it’s a valuable part of the business of making any script come to life.

I’d strongly recommend any writer to get actively involved in rehearsals of their work.  Only, go along with the intention of helping your precious script change for the better, rather than believing your presence will inspire the actors to perform it word-perfect.  Those words might be just dandy on the page, but if an actor can convey the same meaning with the curl of a lip, or a momentary glance, then go with that option and avoid your words being redundant.  Besides, you’ll get the credit for your lean and psychologically insightful script if you do it this way.

The Sandfield Centre in Nottingham, where I did scriptwriting classes, was home to actors and writers learning their craft under the tutelage of professionals from RADA and other noted institutions, and it was an amazing resource.  I was seemingly the only writer there to put 2 + 2 together and realise that student actors plus student writers would be well advised to collaborate, and that led to some valuable early lessons in writing for and working with actors.  As such, I spent just as much time with budding thespians as wannabe wordsmiths, and learned a lot about the differences between the two. 

One weekend, I had lunch Saturday with the writers, and Sunday with the actors.  The writers said little, and got on with the business of eating their modest packed lunches (cheese or ham sandwich, crisps, apple and a can of drink) while reading a book.  For the actors, lunch was a social occasion, each of them taking the opportunity to flourish ‘a little something I found in the fridge’ (Persian style chicken legs and tri-coloured rice salad) and share it with their chums, who were happy to reciprocate with chunks of runny Camembert they had knocking about the place, smoked salmon that would have otherwise been thrown away, and so forth.  Hmm.

Where film is concerned, I recommend getting on set if you can, though some directors like to be the sole voice of authority at that point.  I still wince when I catch one dialogue exchange in a short film I scripted, rewritten to take shooting practicalities into account, which was devised jointly by director and actors.  It features one of my pet hates; reference to a past situation framed by ‘remember that time when..?’; a kind of flashback in disguise that I’d have patched over more elegantly had I been on set at the time.  Instead, I was in the production office surrounded by cans of Red Bull and boxes of KP Crisps, which some enterprising production person had blagged, and phoning through a list of 150 potential extras to see which of them could commit to being in the audience for the boxing match scene we were shooting that weekend.

It’s fascinating to see the way that different performers prepare for their roles.  In a production I put together that used a couple of dancers, they went through their moves at high speed together to get them wired into their bodies: a lot of performance skills require that kind of muscle memory.  Actors will similarly go through their lines as fast as possible in rehearsal, just to be sure they actually know them.  The less a performer has to consciously think about the content of what they’re doing, the more they can deliver it with finesse.

And why stop at watching others deliver your lines?  Taking even a basic acting class will open up the issues involved in making lines on a page come alive, and going to improvisation classes will present you with the problem of how to engage fellow performers and an audience with nothing beyond bodily movements and concepts you can conjure out of thin air.  In either case, you’ll be learning what it’s like to utilise space and movement as part of your repertoire, and in doing so feed that understanding back into your writing, which gets better as a result. 

Names fascinate me. I take great delight in devising names that match the characters they’re intended for. It’s more to do with the sound they make than any meaning they might have. Vernon Scobie. Amber Sakata. Rondo Chaterji. Algis Rekesius. Nolan Mendip. And here’s Emlyn McReedy, from my radio script A Ghost in the Garage, explaining more about my fascination with names:

Do you know there are tribes who spend their whole lives trying to find out what their names are? Some of them go to the grave not knowing what they’re called. They take their names very seriously. Very seriously indeed. They wouldn’t dream of taking up any old nom de plume just because the fancy took them. You could upset ancestral totems, anger the tribal gods. Anything could happen.

As the range of writing I’ve undertaken has headed more towards naturalism, in writing for television for instance, I’ve toned down some of the eccentricities of my naming. But even with more conventional-sounding names there’s room to play with confections of syllables, consonants and vowels. A pilot episode I’ve written for a post-watershed series features characters called Nuala Dunwoody, Leon Carr, Javed Phadkar, Wendy Tamm, and even someone nicknamed Spartacus.

Nicknames are an interesting area. Sometimes we choose them; more often they choose us, or at any rate are given to us by the people in our lives. But not everyone gets to use those nicknames, and even then, not all the time. I winced at a social event when a guest addressed the hostess, Emily, by her husband’s pet name for her, Boo. It’s just something I wouldn’t do: pet names are purely between couples, and unless the speaker in question was intending on a threesome with them, had no business using it in public like that. Mind you, I’ll be sure to use that gaff in a script at some point. Here’s Emlyn again, addressing stuff of this nature:

According to some Christian sects, when you’re called, it’s the name you were christened with that they call you by. That’s what it’s for. And how’s Saint Peter going to know who you are if you turn up at the Pearly Gates with a name that’s not the one he’s got written down? Be a proper to-do if you got up there, told him your name was ‘Spud’ say, and he’d got you down as a Barry.

We have different names at different times, and they’re used by different people. The visitor in A Ghost in the Garage is variously addressed as Mr Chaterji by Emlyn, as Ramesh by Emlyn’s wife Wanda, and their daughter Diane calls him Mr C. Each name is emblematic of their relationship with him, and Diana herself prefers to be called Dee-Dee, much to her father’s annoyance. It’s heightened, especially given that the play is just 30 minutes long, but that’s intentional, and given the span of a month, say, I’m sure you’ll experience different people addressing you or people you know by different names. Next time it happens, take a minute to ponder why they’re using that particular name for you, how it makes you feel when they call you by that name, as opposed to the feeling you get when other people address you by other names. The distinctions will be subtle, and that’s fine…good writing is all about accurate nuances.

It took me a long time to appreciate the delights of structure. For the first few years of my adventures in scriptwriting, I somehow managed to get by without studying it, and write pieces that followed whatever patterns made sense to me at an instinctive level.

I got away with that loose approach for quite a while with a reasonable degree of success – some of the script samples on this site come from that era. But as I began to take screenwriting seriously, it became apparent that structure was going to be the key to its success. Various authors I read and people I spoke to referred to three, five, and more act structures. Turning points. Reversals. Mythic structures, whether from Vogler’s study of Joseph Campbell’s work, or the pioneering studies of Vladimir Propp.

And it fascinated me, all this stuff about structure and form. Suddenly I’d got a vocabulary to talk about what I did. But was it a vocabulary, or mere jargon? And did all this debate on structure make me a better writer, which was surely the goal? Well, the answer to that is yes, but also that it took time to integrate the lessons from other peoples’ views on structure into my own writing.

I like things to be as simple as they can be, and no simpler. And from that perspective, the most useful approach I’ve found to structure comes from writer, producer and development consultant Claire Ingham. It goes like this:

NORMALITY

This is how your film opens, and the world it introduces us to. ‘Normal’ here doesn’t mean mundane, it simply refers to the state of play before the story really kicks off, and that’s as true in a science fiction epic as a family drama.

In Star Wars, this is the period of the story when Luke is a farm hand living with his aunt and uncle.

INCITING INCIDENT

The action which leads one or more characters in the story to change their behaviour, and which contains a question of implicit relevance to them, though typically this question is not directly stated.

The Princess Leia hologram compels Luke to set on a quest, confirmed when he finds his aunt and uncle killed. That quest leads Luke initially to Obi Wan, who plants the seeds of Luke’s Jedi heritage: but can he live up to it, or is he just a farm boy?

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

The course of action that the protagonist and his/her allies embark on to resolve the issues raised by the inciting incident, and which takes up the majority of the screen time of the story as it unfolds. Think in terms of actions and consequences.

Luke, Han Solo, Chewbacca and the droids have fun in space, meet Leia in the flesh, and receive sage advice from Obi Wan while learning to stay one step ahead of Darth Vader. Many merchandising opportunities are encountered.

CLOSURE

The resolution of the question that was raised by the inciting incident. Depending on the nature of the story, it may be a positive experience, and may be a negative one.

Luke trusts the Force, implicitly connecting with his heritage, and in doing so destroys the Death Star.

ENDING

In which loose ends are tied up, and minor matters dealt with before the credits roll.

Princess Leia gives everyone medals and they have jelly and ice cream.

Now, I appreciate structure in a different way: it’s the means of making the story you want to tell the right and inevitable one. And the template I just described is something I work with organically, implicit in most of the stories I want to tell unless for some reason I choose to tell them differently.

A few days ago I mentioned the Shadowline/Image ‘create a superheroine’ contest. Which I didn’t win. Hey ho. So, here are my three entries for your entertainment. Your thoughts are very welcome. I may yet do something with these concepts another day, should the world of comics open up to me…

TROUBLE MAGNET

There is zero way that I can be pregnant. The last time I even saw a naked man was when I caught Bishop Simian trying to pass himself off as a howler monkey at the city zoo. Before that, I don’t like to think. Well, OK. That party the Action Faction had for their new HQ? I did lock tongues with some random mutant, but I swear there was spandex covering everything that matters. Dad says I shouldn’t have called myself Trouble Magnet, but if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have inherited the powers and everything — if you can call making being really unlucky work for you a ‘power’ — and as far as I’m concerned that includes the name. And I so don’t have the time for dealing with a foetus. Not when The Fabulist is threatening to mesmerise all of Nixburgh into voting him Mayor on a ‘Repeal the law of averages’ ticket. But hey, I’m a tryer. The Chronicle called me feisty the other week. Even if they did print a picture of that bitch Sheila-Na-Gig.

ZOMBINA

Being undead, you get to find out who your friends really are. Some of them haven’t come near me since I came out, others have been real supportive. Like Wayne, who’s been so compassionate I could throttle him, but hasn’t once touched me since it happened. Which is one more reason for me to get revenge on Commander Skull, once I figure out how. Having the powers of a corpse and an appetite for flesh doesn’t give me much latitude when it comes to dealing with a full-blown supervillain. But I’m pissed, I’ve got contacts on the undead scene, and I know just where the bonehead bastard will be tomorrow night, which might just give me the edge I need to take him down. I’ve even got a name, Zombina, and a costume, to help me feel I’m up to it. Wish me luck, huh?

INAMORATA

A friend told me once that ‘your greatest strength is your greatest weakness’. Then he tried to kiss me. Which was maybe the fifth time that day someone had tried to taste my tongue. ‘Inamorata: to know her is to love her’ is the line the papers tend to run when I crop up. Which I do quite a bit because, well, they love me just like everyone else. Making the business of finding someone I might actually want to love a bit of a drag. And now Canis Rex is on the scene, I have icky proof that I don’t just appeal to humans. He’s threatening to conquer the planet if I don’t consent to be his queen. And if I do marry him, he wants to give me the planet as a gift anyway. Which gives you some idea of the predicament I’m in.